Under African skies

Thirty years ago, Aminatta Forna's father was framed and then executed by the Sierra Leone government. Here, she recounts how she made peace with her past - and commemorated his life - by helping replant the family estate.

It has rained during the night, sheet lightning turned the sky momentarily into day. In the morning, the warm, reddish earth has turned dark. After the muezzin's call to prayers, the village bell sounds and the men and women assemble under a vast silver sky, ready for work. The land has been cleared, the scrub burned and brushed. Stakes mark where the new trees will be planted. The stumps and roots that still stand in the clearing will rot into the earth, providing nutrients for the seedlings. By the end of the rains, my cousin Morlai tells me, the foot-high seedlings will be as tall as me.

I am in my father's village, where he was born and raised. My grandfather, Pa Roke Forna, a regent chief, ran a coffee plantation here. He arrived in the Twenties, bringing wives and retainers. The coffee trees soared, a village began to flourish. But by the Seventies, coffee prices had already begun to slide. Today the plantation, long neglected, has been engulfed by the forest. The only remaining signs of the great avenues are the red berries growing wild. It is a strange, beautiful place.

When he died in 1976, my grandfather was said to be 103 years old, but the truth is that nobody really knew. By my best estimate he was born around 1890, making him in his mid-eighties at the time of his death - still an extraordinary age in a country where medical care scarcely exists. As it was, he survived his own son by more than a year.

Thirty years ago this month - on 19 July 1975 - my father was executed by the Sierra Leone government. I was at home the rainy night he was taken away, alone in the sitting room when two agents from the secret police arrived. I was 10 years old. My father, a medical doctor turned political dissident, had recently been released from three years' detention. 'Tell Mum I'll be back later,' were the last words he said to me as he stepped out into the rain. Almost exactly a year later, he was hanged.

Morlai was in the house, too, the night my father was taken away. I hero-worshipped Morlai. A stylish dresser, he favoured patterned, slim-fit shirts and nylon flares. He made me giggle when he called me 'sistah' in an accent straight out of Shaft, and had me doubled over with his high-kicking, air-punching rendition of Carl Douglas's 'Kung Fu Fighting'. The morning after the arrest it was Morlai who tried to take food to my father in the detention cells. And in the months that followed, during my father's trial, it was to Morlai I turned with the questions nobody else would answer.

In the decades that followed my father's death, we lost touch. I went to university in London at the start of the Eighties and have lived there ever since. During the dark years of the civil war in the Nineties, I heard little news of my family. Later, Morlai wrote in need of help. He had lost everything, seen two homes burned, was nearly shot when he was taken for a rebel. Only the intervention of one of the soldiers in the firing squad - whom Morlai had taught when he worked as a tutor - saved his life.

Then, after 10 years, the war was brought to an end by the Nigerian-led Ecowas (Economic Community of West African States) forces, shored up by UN peacekeepers and a contingent of British troops. ← In 2000, I returned to Sierra Leone to write a memoir of my father and my childhood. Morlai and I were reunited. He agreed to help with the research and for weeks we worked as a team uncovering the past.

The Devil that Danced on the Water was published in 2002. It told of the events leading up to my father's arrest and traced what became of him after the family last saw him. When I was 10, all I had really known was that my father had resigned from the government he once served and set up an opposition party. The party had been banned overnight, its leaders thrown into jail. In the years that followed, free elections became a thing of the past, the population lived under a dictatorship whose power was bolstered by spies and thugs.

After he was taken away, my father was held in solitary confinement, not allowed to wash, shave or change his clothes. When my stepmother finally found a lawyer who dared to defend her husband, he was refused access to his client until the first day of the trial. After two months, the jury, packed with government stooges, took one hour to return a verdict of guilty. Eight men were hanged.

By the time my book was published, the war was over and people were looking for a way to understand the violence that had engulfed our country. In the months that followed, I received hundreds of letters, many from Sierra Leoneans. I'd set out to write my family's story, but ended up writing about how a country loses its way. For decades, the elite had been in denial - over the human-rights abuses, the extraordinary levels of corruption, the growing numbers of disenfranchised youth - even while civil war raged in neighbouring Liberia. My father was the first casualty of a sequence of events that would go on to claim hundreds of thousands of lives.

After his execution, my father's body and those of the other men were taken to Rokupa, a cemetery on the outskirts of town, and dumped in an unmarked pit. Acid was poured over them. Siaka Stevens, by then the country's absolute ruler, had attempted to erase every trace of his enemies. Denying a dictator the chance to create his own version of history was an important part of resurrecting the memories of those men.

Now Morlai and I are together again 30 years after my father's death, with a new project to commemorate the man who always said his own father was the greatest influence on his life. We are replanting our grandfather's plantation.

Out in the fields, the heat of the day is already climbing, even though the sun has barely risen. By midday, the temperature here on the plains, in the heart of the country, will reach upwards of 40C. Each worker collects a seedling and stands behind one of the staked sites. Morlai is in the middle, holding aloft a seedling, shouting directions in Temne.

The excitement is palpable. Children and teachers from the school have come to join in the planting. Building a school was the first project Morlai and I undertook. The village provided all the labour; my husband and I raised the funds; Morlai co-ordinated the work. On another recent visit, I stood in front of the vehicle I had borrowed, staring at the names of children drawn in the dust, and laughed out loud. The year before none of them had known how to write. Never had graffiti looked so beautiful.

Traditionally, the people here are rice farmers. Now most have returned to subsistence farming. Where once they relied on sales of their surpluses to help them through the 'hungry season', today free-market economics have seen an influx of rice from countries who subsidise their farmers, sold at such low prices that the local coarse-grain variety cannot compete.

Now, on top of it all, the rains have come early. The vegetation is a startling multitude of greens. But the beauty of the landscape disguises a bitter truth. The timetable for farming rice here is rigid. The unexpected rains mean the farmers have not had time to clear the land.

Part of our plan is to introduce new, more productive systems of farming to sustain the village in the long term. We'll begin by growing saleable ground crops, such as cassava and groundnuts, between the trees. The villagers don't understand why they can no longer make a profit selling rice or how world trade discriminates against poor farmers like them. Even our new venture is subject to decisions taken thousands of miles away. It would be uneconomic for us to plant coffee again, so we have chosen cashew trees. The crop has been selected for preferential import status under George Bush's African Growth and Opportunity Act. We hope this will be good news for us.

A week before the first day of planting we held a meeting in the village. In my grandfather's days, the plantation relied heavily on indentured labour. We plan to implement a shared-ownership scheme. During the meeting, we also review the schedule: planting 50 acres with 2,000 trees by the end of the rains. Up to 100 acres next year.

I am awed and a little nervous at the scale of the undertaking. Most of what I have learned about growing cashews has come from searching the internet. I am a writer. I live in a terraced house in London. But somehow this is what Africa does to you, the legacy of every one of us born with Africa's blood running in our veins.

And if I am truthful with myself, this is what draws me back. In Europe, the wheels of life are well oiled, we are pampered, so safe we become afraid to take a risk. People here have little to lose.

There was a time I dreaded returning to Sierra Leone. I would meet former colleagues of my father and wonder what they knew, whether they had played a part in his death. Gradually, I began to avoid coming home. Throughout my twenties and early thirties, I barely set foot in the place. Not until I had finished writing the book did my feelings about the country alter.

Back in Freetown, during this trip, my step-mother Yabome (whom I have called Mum since I was a child) shows me the front page of a newspaper. On it is the text of my father's 1970 letter resigning from his post as minister of finance. Following an article I wrote in a British newspaper, somebody in America published the letter in full on the web. Subsequently, two newspapers here have followed suit.

The predictions my father made in that letter have proved to be astonishingly, tragically accurate. He foresaw how Sierra Leone would become a one-party state. Foreshadowing his own death, he accused the president of using violence to silence his critics. He revealed details of Stevens's spending, over which the two men had argued bitterly. In a later letter, written hours before his execution, he talked of the end of the rule of law, the coming anarchy.

In the week that follows my conversation with Mum, two men of my father's generation, one a politician, the other a diplomat, make the same remark: 'Your father signed his own death warrant with that letter.' The comment is stunningly insensitive. I stare at the expression on the face of each speaker. What is it I see there? Not remorse or humility, certainly; rather, a strange satisfaction.

The second man goes on to add that, back in the Seventies, a friend had once kicked him under the table for criticising the government at a dinner. 'Thank goodness,' he laughs. 'I made sure I kept quiet after that.' When he has finished, I do something I have never done before. I tell him what a shame it is that an entire generation did the same, all the good men who did nothing.

A few days later, a visitor arrives at Mum's house, somebody I welcome. Unfa Mansaray stood trial alongside my father, was convicted and sentenced to death. All through the night he listened as each man was led from his cell to the gallows, my father first. ← Unfa waited his turn. Only the next morning did he discover his sentence had been commuted to life.

Today, I can never look at Unfa without wondering what it must be like to believe, truly believe, you are going to die. There is no clue in his countenance, serene and courteous always. Unfa spent 14 years in prison. When he was released, the company where he had worked as a cook had closed, his pension gone.

It was Unfa who led me to one of the men who gave evidence during the trial. By then I had spoken to two former soldiers who admitted they had been paid to bear false witness. I was surprised to find Unfa was still in touch with the third man, Saidu Brima. 'Ah, but I have forgiven him,' he had told me. I met Saidu, and when I heard his story, recounted quietly and without self-pity, of how he had been beaten and tortured, I ended up feeling desperately sorry for him. Later I wrote: 'A poor, uneducated man in a barren country. His destiny did not belong to him.' Mum was so moved she even gave him a job in the house when he was out of work, so for a while we all ended up, surreally, living under one roof.

Unfa tells me Saidu is upcountry, or he too would have come to say hello. I send my regards and ask Unfa about his life since we first met. He tells me how he spent a year cooking for David Crane, chief prosecutor at the Special Court set up with money from the UN to try war criminals. The hearings are ongoing.'Did he know who you were?' I ask.

'No, madam,' answers Unfa. And we both smile at that - one of the defendants of perhaps the country's most famous treason trial working quietly in the celebrated lawyer's kitchens.

A few days later, driving into town, I think about how, in a way, I envy Unfa and Mum their equanimity. For my stepmother, telling our story has closed a troubled chapter in her life. After my father's death, even old friends avoided her, she had trouble finding an apartment and a job. She remained unbowed through it all, and her strength inspired me. When I gave her a copy of the book, I inscribed it with a quote from Bertolt Brecht: '"And is there singing in the darkness? Yes, there is singing in the darkness." To Mum, who sang in the darkness.'

I drive down Pademba Road, past the prison, on my way to visit Donald. Donald is one of only seven paediatricians working in the entire country. His father resigned his government post at the same time as my father. With Donald's uncle, the three men founded the United Democratic Party (UDP). They spent years together in Pademba Road Prison. His uncle, Ibrahim Bash Taqi, an outspoken and likeable journalist, was hanged. Donald's father was released after the executions and Donald remembers him arriving home after being forced to walk all the way, his hair in dreadlocks, wearing the clothes he was arrested in a year before.

We rarely talk about these things any more, though these are the threads that connect us. Life goes on. But this year is different because of the anniversary. Donald is older than me, remembers more of the detail of that time. Our compound being raided by government thugs during the days of the UDP. I was six, too young to realise the gravity of the danger. Donald was 11, he climbed inside a big gramophone and hid until he was discovered by men trying to steal it.

After university, Donald applied to medical school but found his candidacy blocked. Eventually he won a scholarship to China and left the country for 10 years. One day, Donald tells me, he will enter politics himself. He still believes the country can change. 'Otherwise I wouldn't be here,' he says. And I realise the same is true of me. I am here because I believe this country can have a future. All it requires is for enough of us to think the same way.

I remark that many people wonder at our optimism. Sierra Leone is the poorest country in the world, a place where life expectancy is actually dropping. There are constant blackouts in the capital, vast unemployment. 'It is strange in a way,' agrees Donald, 'after all that happened to us. But then we knew what was going to happen in Sierra Leone. Because our fathers prepared us. And we understand why, and how it could be different.'

We share the same anger that the warnings were ignored by people who should have known better. 'Look around at everything that has happened,' Donald speaks quietly and gazes out of the window. 'Everything this country has gone through. And yet they never feel responsible for their silence.'

When I was a child, I was given an autograph book for Christmas. I went around collecting the signatures of everybody in the family. My father wrote something for me: 'Honour and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part and there the honour lies.' I was too young then to understand the meaning of the words.

But that's what it comes down to - the reason I am standing in acres of scrub that have been burned and cleared and are now ready to be planted. It doesn't look too attractive right now, but in three years' time all this will be avenues of cashew trees.

I am following in the footsteps of my father, and of my grandfather who came to this place at the beginning of another century following a diviner's prophecy. The story was told to me by his eldest daughter, who remembers arriving here riding on his shoulders. Her tale so inspired me I turned it into a novel which I have just finished writing.

Now art and life have begun to imitate each other. I can stand where my grandfather and father once stood, look out upon the same view - the river curling around the houses, the meeting house and the well, the men working in the fields. So little has changed, everything is almost exactly as it would have been when they were alive. I can see it all through their eyes, I can dream their dreams.

And for a moment, the obstacles disappear and everything becomes possible.

· Aminatta Forna is the author of The Devil that Danced on the Water (£7.99, HarperCollins). Her latest novel, The Ancestor Stones, will be published in April next year